Monthly Archives: April 2015

It’s been a while since our last blog post – and the reason for that is that we’ve all been busy doing lots of things that are not very news-worthy. Life in research tends to go in cycles a bit like this – sometimes we have lots of interesting things happening that we can tell you about, and other times it’s all just busy-busy-busy with the daily grind. Ged, Caroline and Vicky have been busy writing applications for research money – as we mentioned on our “What is research?” tab, we have to apply to charities and other big funding organisations for money to support our work, and we’ve had a particular flurry of applications recently. We are hoping that some of them will be successful – we think the projects we want to do are exciting and worthwhile, so we have to hope that the charities agree with us!

Our MRes students – Lorna, Matt and Hannah – have been working very hard at doing lots of studies with our very kind patients and volunteers. Lorna, Matt and Hannah have to write a big essay (‘dissertation’) by September this year, reporting on the research that they’ve done during their year in the lab and what they found. The writing part can take quite some time so they have to finish their studies in the next couple of months to leave plenty of time for writing (and the “thinking about what it all means” part). Dan is also very busy with his study on the intensive care unit (ICU). Patients on ICU are very unwell, and so they have pretty much all aspects of how their body is working measured all the time, to allow the care team to look after them in the best way. Dan has to record all of these measurements for his research, so even having one patient in his study can keep him pretty busy!

Alan is coming to the end of his PhD, and we will certainly tell you when it’s all finished – a massive achievement, and a celebration will definitely be in order. Alan also recently added details of one of his studies to the “Research we’ve published” tab, and I’m sure there will be more to come in time.

We will have news to come soon of an official logo for the blog and Facebook and twitter pages, as well as details of the fantastic person who has designed the logo for us. In fact, we will probably have a number of logo options and so will ask you to vote and choose your favourite. We also have some new research studies starting soon, and results of some finished projects, so will keep you posted on those too. For now though, noses to the grindstone!